Before we left for Iowa City, some of the group went to the Brent Friest Farm to learn how to artifically inseminate sows. (Brandon will be a dad to 17 babies now). While the boys were learning the finer points of animal husbandry Hannah and I went to ride a planter with Brent Friest. After playing ISpy to find the planter in like seven different fields, we spotted the green tractor with a blue planter (blue = Kinze implments in Iowa). We hopped in the tractor and got the run down on how it works and everything the human needs to do, and everything the human does not need to do. Most of the work is done my automatic GSP steering. The farmer must turn around at the end of a row but can just watch the monitors when going down the row. There were five screens in Brent’s tractor that showed him his progress and productivity. He was planting around 35,000 seeds per acre while going 7 mph. He said it would take him about 5 hours to finish his field today.
Riding the tractor was SO COOL and is really nothing like I would have imagined it before coming to Iowa.
When we got to Iowa City, we went to speak with Connie Mutel about Climate Change Presentation. She was the first person to talk about individual efforts to lessen effects of climate change, other presenters focused on mitigation strictly through agriculture. That was interesting. She basically gave a science lesson that filled in the blanks between all of the policies and opinions we have been getting. It was helpful to hear facts to help us shape our own views.
Tonight, for dinner we ate with Mary Mascher (D-Iowa City) at Orchard Green. It was a really fancy restaurant and the food was amazing. I’m not one for overpaying for food but I certainly understand why others are. Representative Masher, who is friends with Morris, is just as nice as Morris. She really thinks we need a moderate president to accomplish anything beneficial. We chatted with her over dinner more about what we’ve learned and about politics. After dinner, some of us went with her to a microbrewery and continued to chat over hipster beer.